The present invention relates to an information retrieval apparatus and information retrieval method in which information is provided as data bases in various formats for description. More particularly, it relates to an information retrieval apparatus and information retrieval method for information on various commodities provided by different information providers in communication such as the Internet.
Recently, selling by correspondence utilizing virtual shopping malls or shopping pages provided by computer communication or the Internet has been holding the spotlight.
However, consumers who purchase commodities through such virtual shopping malls or shopping pages encounter problems such as inability to find the commodities they want to purchase. Further, providers who provide commodities have a problem in that their customers do not come to their shops (or they do not access their home pages). The term "commodities" used here implies not only material commodities but also non-material commodities, for example, services such as programs for broadcast in cases wherein the provider of the commodities (hereinafter simply referred to as "provider") is a broadcaster.
Among the above-described problems, a consumer's inability to find commodities as a refers to situations as described below.
For example, consider situations when someone can not find a program that broadcasts a piece of music he or she wishes to listen to from among programs, or a when someone can not find a movie for which he or she wishes to watch a certain actor performing because a program table shows only general information. Also, consider a situation in which someone can not find a home page that sells a certain commodity over the Internet.
In some cases, desired commodities are not specifically identified by a consumer unlike the above-described situations, and the consumer only looks for some interesting program or just wants to know commodities which are recently popular.
From a provider's point of view, a problem arises in that a new WWW site opened on the Internet can not be found by consumers because current retrieval services on the Internet employ a system in which commodities are accessed only from the consumers' side.
Further, retrieval services on the Internet utilize techniques for full text retrieval that only allow retrieval using keywords. This results in a problem in that, for example, a red polo shirt is retrieved using the logical product of two keywords "red" and "polo shirt"; the returned result is a page on which red T shirts and yellow polo shirts are sold; and the user thus receives a result of retrieval listing commodities that he or she has not intended to find. Furthermore, conventional retrieval services do not allow someone to specify a range of numerical values, for example, 5000 yen or less because they treat keywords only as character strings.
As described above, the retrieval of commodities currently available has the problems that consumers cannot find commodities to buy, and a result of retrieval may include many commodities which are different from what is desired, because the retrieval is performed on a full text basis retrieval using keywords. Thus, providers encounter the problem that their customers do not visit their shops.